Buttering my bread, I wonder if I will run out of either or both before this is over. I notice the habit pattern of the worry brain. Will John continue to have cream for his coffee?
Being comfortable or satiated will end long before risk of malnutrition or starvation.
Questioning the ethics of having someone deliver food to me: my desire to have my favorite tea overriding the safety or even the life of another.
Last evening, choking on a piece of anniversary steak, not quite able to swallow (even saliva) for a few seconds, compassion for those dying from this virus without breath flooded my body.
COVID-19.
Tucked within all of this inconvenience is such tender truth. I am at this moment still among the more fortunate. I am not separate from anything that is happening, although I am insulated from the worst of it.
Remembering a small book I read about the children orphaned by the bombing raids of World War II. “Someone had the idea of sending each child to bed with a piece of bread to hold. Bread, real food to hold. And they could finally sleep because they knew that they would wake up and have something to eat in the morning.” (See Sleeping with Bread: Holding What Gives You Life, by Dennis Linn.)
Perhaps I should sleep with a favorite bag of tea.
When I exit the master bedroom, having been on Zoom with my writing group, John has made egg salad. I say, “Oh, Honey, I wish you hadn’t used the eggs. Did you not hear me say I had found a couple cans of tuna in the cupboard?”
“I didn’t want tuna,” he snapped. “We can get more eggs.”
“How are we going to do that?” I ask.
“You can call and have deliveries made. They will deliver food right to your door.”
Whether his tone, words, or energy, I feel and inquire, “Are you annoyed with me?”
“I am,” he admits, as he walks out of the kitchen.
I take the lump in my throat back with me to the master bedroom where my laptop is and I put my fingers on the keyboard.
Breathe….
Earlier this morning I had a phone conversation about the ethics of going to the bank to make a deposit. It is a rather large check. It felt safer to do what was familiar: to go to the bank. Safer for all sentient beings?
Whose lives are put on the line to deliver our eggs to the grocery store, to move them from the grocery store to the people who order them from their safe shelter?
I feel that familiar tension—sadness— of sharing life with those who view the world so differently. I am so mad at him for his self-centered world view. It frightens me. In that feeling, I gently witness the sense of “selfing” I have created again.
No individual “I” is separate, neither are “mine” exempt.
The pandemic will end more easily as I see the truth about this distinction….
